Reading Notes: Native American, Part A
The Cloud That Was Lost
- high mountains
- clouds sleep on the top of peaks
- trying to grow heavy enough to send down rain
- explains fog
- cloud got lost over flat land
- cloud started crying
- stretched itself out and gave flowers below color
- how the flower Wild Pholx got its soft colors that look like evening clouds
Grandmother River's Trick
- scared of other fish in the river
- Basically bully of the river
- ate and ate but were never hungy
- oh grandmother was river
- she didn't like the bully fish
- The river asked the cloud to create a flood
- Tricked the garfish to swim out of the river banks and explore where her water now touched
- was able to run and leave the gar fish in the little pools newly created
The plant that grows in trees
- mistletoe
- only birds can reach the little white berries that only appear in both in summer and winter
- bird put it there once because it had pity on the mistletoe
- Thunderbird thanked the mistletoe for its berries
- Misltoe tells the bird it will soon die
- Other animals feed on it in the winter causing it to die
- so bird takes misltoe up to tree so animals cant feed on it
- And that is why the mistletoe keeps growing in the trees
The thunder bird laughed and answered: "Oh, but I will see to that." The bird then wiped his long bill, to which stuck some of the berries of the mistletoe, on a limb. "See?" said the bird. "The berries stick on the limb. They will grow there, like you. And whenever other birds eat your berries they will wipe their bills as I do and the seeds of the mistletoe will continue to grow forever and ever."
Mistletoe
Story source: When the Storm God Rides: Tejas and Other Indian Legends retold by Florence Stratton and illustrated by Berniece Burrough (1936).
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